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Virginia Tech Anguishes Over Missed Signals

Date Published:

Apr 21, 2007 03:00 AM

Author:
ADAM GELLER

Source:
Associated Press via Washington Post

BLACKSBURG,
Va. -- The student slouched into his chair, his face wrapped in
sunglasses, the brim of his baseball cap pulled down so low his eyes
were almost lost. The Virginia Tech professor who took a seat across
from him did so because there didn't really seem to be any other option.

But
in three, hour-long talks that began that October day, Lucinda Roy
tentatively edged away from the lesson plan for her class of one,
moving beyond poetry and drawing the darkly troubled student, Seung-Hui
Cho, into a tortured and all-too-brief conversation about the human
need for friendship and the pain of being trapped inside oneself.

Looking
back, it may have been the closest anyone ever came to reaching the
brooding loner before he metamorphosed into the gunman responsible for
the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

But soon after
their meetings in 2005, Roy _ who alerted university officials with her
fears about the student and tried to get him into counseling _ lost
touch with Cho. The semester ended. She went on leave. They exchanged
e-mails once or twice. Then nothing.

It is only now that she asks herself: What if ...?

Roy
has wrestled with that question endlessly in the past few days. And it
is a variation of the one that now haunts this quarrystone campus and
mountain town, an aching doubt that grows with each new revelation of
missed signals and miscalculations, twists of fate and legal loopholes,
and what appear increasingly like a series of lost opportunities to
avert tragedy.

"That's a question I'll probably be asking myself
the rest of my life," Roy says. "What else could I have done? Could I
have done more? I think probably all of us could have done more."

In
fact, it is not at all certain what might have stopped Cho from
carrying out the rampage that left 32 people dead before he killed
himself.

What has become clear is that at numerous points over
the past year and a half, critical incidents took place that at least
gave people around Cho _ as well as administrators, police and mental
health providers _ the briefest windows into his state of mind, and
perhaps chances to alter his path to destruction.

We wouldn't be
human if we didn't second-guess ourselves. And there's probably no time
when that is more true than after a tragedy unleashed by a fellow human
being.

"I don't think at the time you could have said he's
definitely going to shoot someone. But we had talked about he was
likely to do that if there was someone that was going to do it," says
Andy Koch a junior from Richmond, Va., who was Cho's suitemate last
year.

"The first thing I thought of Monday was Seung ... and if
that's the first thing you think about, there were definitely some
things that we should have done," he says. But "I don't know what we
could have done."

Many Virginia Tech students say that they do
not want to second-guess, that they are content that university
officials and those who came in contact with Cho did the best they
could to prevent the tragedy.

But the story of the Virginia Tech
massacre is a labyrinth of what-ifs. Many of them come with
explanations any reasonable person would understand. There's just one
problem with such explanations: They do nothing to explain the horror
of the most unspeakable acts.

"We're all asking `what if,' and we
all want to know why," says Fawn Price, a sophomore from Lebanon, Va.
"But I don't think we're going to get the answers we need as soon as we
need them."

___

There were signs, so many signs.

Or
so it appears in hindsight. But the people in the position to do
something and the systems we create to protect ourselves seemed
ill-equipped to deal with Cho.

There was an opportunity when two
female students called university police, soon after Roy began meeting
with Cho. They were being hounded, they complained _ there were
repeated phone calls, instant messages, notes. They did not know Cho
and did not want to know him.

Then, in December 2005, Koch called police to say that his suitemate seemed suicidal.

Officers
went to speak with Cho. He was referred to the local mental health
center, and then sent to a psychiatric care hospital.

Here was Cho, safely away from campus, in the arms of the mental health system. What if it had been possible to keep him there?

It didn't happen. A day or two later, he was released and returned to campus.

Virginia Tech officials say his care was out of their hands, and they could not know that he needed more help.

And
what could they have done? When George Washington University and New
York's Hunter College expelled students who appeared suicidal, the
students sued.

Schools have to "balance the rights of students
with the rights of the communities and with what parents want, and its
not an easy thing to do," says Dr. Joanna Locke of the Jed Foundation,
which works to prevent suicide and promote mental health among college
students.

What about the mental health providers beyond campus who dealt directly with Cho? Couldn't they have done something?

Not
unless Cho shared his morbid fantasies, and people like Cho almost
never do, says Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychologist who has
profiled mass murderers.

Cho "is not a person who fell through the cracks. He's a person who crawled into the cracks," Welner says.

If mental health providers couldn't follow him there, what if university police had pursued a case against him?

But
that would have required the two female students to press stalking
charges against Cho. And after speaking with Virginia Tech officers,
the two women decided against it, police say.

Other female
students said last week that they would almost certainly have made the
same decision. Unusual behavior is not unusual on campus. No one wants
to make trouble for others.

"Stalking happens on almost every
campus across the country. It is a problem and people rarely know how
to deal with it," says Michele Galietta, a clinical psychologist who is
researching the treatment of stalkers.

"I think that's why
sometimes officials are hesitant to take a heavy hand with it," she
says. "Keep in mind that this guy (Cho) didn't threaten anyone. He did
bizarre things."

But that hasn't stopped Galietta from mulling a whole series of what-ifs.

If
the women had pursued a case, and if Cho had been convicted of stalking
_ rather than a misdemeanor charge of harassment _ he would have
entered the domain of the criminal justice system. If so, he might have
served time and on release would have been assigned to a probation
officer who could've have monitored his behavior. When he went to buy a
gun, a criminal record would have prevented it, she says.

And that raises the emotionally charged question of Cho's access to guns.

What if firearms laws had been tougher?

The
problem with that question is that, as easy as it is to buy a gun in a
state like Virginia, a case can be made that Cho still shouldn't have
made it through the net.

After Cho was evaluated at a psychiatric
hospital in late 2005, a judge found that the student "presents an
imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness." That should
have disqualified him from purchasing a gun under federal law, experts
say.

But Virginia court officials insist that because the judge
ordered only outpatient treatment _ and did not commit Cho to a
psychiatric hospital _ they were not required to submit the information
to be entered in the federal databases for background checks.

The
thread that runs through nearly all the what-ifs at Virginia Tech is
the most obvious and perhaps the most difficult to parse. What if the
university police and administration had taken more decisive action, at
any number of junctures?

That opens up a debate about whether Virginia Tech did enough to protect itself against threats from within.

There
are many who are willing to accept school officials' word that they
took all possible security measures to prevent what happened here.
College police departments are just as well-trained and sophisticated
as any city department and they take just as aggressive a stance in
preventing violence, says Ray Thrower, head of security at Minnesota's
Gustavus Adolphus College and president-elect of the International
Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.

If
anything, Virginia Tech _ one of the first campus police departments in
the country to win professional accreditation _ exemplifies that
argument.

But could that argument be missing the point?

The
problem with Virginia Tech's policing _ and with most other college's
approach to security _ runs deeper than training or resources or
dedication, says S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus Inc., a
nonprofit watchdog group. The problem is mindset, he says.

On a campus, everyone is a big family _ the administrators, the students, the faculty and the university's security officers.

As
a result, "the tendency is to overlook or downplay potential problems,"
Carter says. "They don't want to think that their campus community
members _ their students _ could be that dangerous."

Carter
believes that mind-set was almost certainly a factor in how Virginia
Tech officers handled _ or mishandled _ previous complaints about Cho.
And it was clearly a factor in many of the things that went wrong early
on a flurry-filled morning last Monday when a campus just stirring from
its weekend slumber was shaken by gunfire, he says.

The dorm Cho
chose for as his first target requires a magnetic card for entry. But
students say they let each other into one another's dorms all the time.
What if the security system had been more comprehensive?

When
officers responded to a 911 call at West Ambler Johnston Hall and found
the bodies of resident assistant Ryan Clark and freshman Emily Hilscher
on the fourth floor, they began investigating the killings as a crime
of domestic violence. The problem, Carter says, is that they even as
they pursued that lead, investigators assumed as fact a theory that
hadn't yet been proven.

What if they'd considered the possibility
of shooter with a different profile, one who had no intention of
stopping with two victims?

Administrators and police did not
decide to lock down the campus and notify students of the violence
taking place around them until the shootings that left 31 more students
dead in Norris Hall. What if they'd acted sooner?

It is the last
in a heart-rending series of what-ifs. Together, they weigh on the mind
but not because it is essential to lay blame, or to find a culprit.

They
matter because we need to understand. Because to know what, if anything
could have been done differently, is the only means we have for
squeezing a drop of reason, comfort or understanding from utter
senselessness.

What if we had it all to do all over again? Would
Reema Samaha have lived to dance once more? Would Michael Pohle still
be here to don cap and gown this spring and clutch his diploma?

What
if? Can there be anyone who hasn't asked themselves that question in
recent days and not felt the ache of knowing it can never be adequately
answered?

That is a feeling that Chris Flynn, director of
Virginia Tech's mental health counseling center, is beginning to
understand all too well.

We are MFI

Cindi Fisher, mother of psychiatric survivor

Cindi Fisher has fought for years for her son, who has experienced forced psychiatric drugging and other human rights violations in the State of Washington. She has even held protest fasts on her son's behalf (see photo of Day One). Cindi says: "In the past, advocating for my 33-year-old psychiatric survivor son over the years has been very frustrating and has sometimes felt hopeless! Now, as a member of MindFreedom, I feel I have the voice of thousands to join me. My effectiveness and awareness as an advocate has indeed multiplied a thousand times. Thank you David and MindFreedom for your many years of work to build such a powerful and empowering organization!"